Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bcm!shell!nuchat!sugar!karl
From: karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: much smaller history file after expire -r -h
Keywords: more naive questions
Message-ID: <3456@sugar.uu.net>
Date: 19 Feb 89 13:38:55 GMT
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston, TX
Lines: 17

The history file was 2.5 megabytes long.  I did an

	expire -r -h -e14 -E28

...and afterwards, the history file was only 750 Kbytes.  An equivalent 
proportion of articles were not removed.

The system is vanilla System V/3 (386), news 2.11 patchlevel 14, with John 
Zeeff's dbz routines.

The question is:  Is this normal?  I can see how a dbm file would never shrink
even with deletes, but since a normal expire rebuilds the history file anyway,
the new history file shouldn't contain lots of deleted entries.
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